The website php-mag.net was relaunched today. In the past, the magazine was available as a true print edition (really nice offset print in full colour, not just a laser printer output) every two months (as the German edition I’m responsible for is also available in this frequency) and had a PDF version as „a plus“ (included with a new feature article every month). Now, they entirely switched to PDF and will now be published every month.

I think this is a step in the right direction, especially in a global world-wide view. Print distribution around the globe is at high cost, so PDF is the right format to go on with.

My personal point of view, though, is that I love printed stuff. Perhaps this has to do with Germany’s long history in the area of printed media, but I like the haptic feeling that you will have when opening a nice book or magazine while drinking a cup of tea especially on cold days. :-)

So, for the German PHP Magazin (which has independant topics in contrast to the international issue) in future I will love to receive the printed issues in my mailbox and I’m currently preparing our colour laser printer for the new issue of the International PHP Magazine. :-)

Did you know that MySQL Cluster has been available since MySQL 4 within the Max distribution (IIRC 4.1 series)? So just
grab your copy at mysql.com (of course the new 5.x series :-) and play with the
cluster.

As promised, here’s now the first part of the slides from the International PHP Conferences. The sessions I gave were the introduction for the Management Day, „100,000 SQLite installations – lessons learned“ (and where the borders are in regards to the usage of MySQL) and „WebServices with PHP5“.

Yesterday, the International PHP Conference 2005 closed its doors. So far,
it was very nice to see all the people again and have some good time. Luckily, there was enough free beer at the VIP
Reception and the PHP Lounge. :-) This year, we introduced some new events:

The Management Day: you know, attendees usually are not only the smaller or mid-sized companies. Mostly, companies
like Deutsche Telekom, Siemens and other companies send 3-10 people from their department to this Conference to catch
up with the latest hot development in the PHP scene. This year, we tried to provide a separate day fully dedicated to the
topic „PHP in the Enterprise“. I think we pretty much succeeded. We invited companies like T-Online (a subsidiary company of
Deutsche Telekom), HypoVereinsbank (one of Europe’s largest banks), Pangora GmbH (a subsidiary company of Lycos Europe),
EurotaxxGlass’s (they publish the well-known Schwacke book for used cars) and Amadeus Fire AG to let them talk about their
usage of PHP (or better, the LAMP stack because some heavily rely at their core on PHP+MySQL) in their company and how
they think that PHP fulfills their needs and where PHP has to improve. At the beginning of this day and as this day was only
in German language, I provided a renewal of my talk „10 years of PHP and MySQL in Germany“ (which I gave at LinuxTag) where
I provided a closer look into how the PHP business here in Germany has been developing in the last 7 years and what will perhaps
follow in the next years. After the company sessions, the Management Day closed with a discussion panel and some sponsored
free drinks and food (by my company).

PHP Code Camp: Software&Support and I had the following question which led to the PHP Code Camp: „How can we give the people/community an understanding of how you write a PHP extension in C?“. Thanks to Marcus Börger, Johannes Schlüter, Derick
Rethans and Ilia Alshanetsky the attendees could learn how to write a PHP extension. From what I have heard, the PHP Code Camp (which started at 4.30 pm and ended around 9 pm with some free beer and pizza) was pretty well perceived, and I hope that we will
repeat that next year. Thanks again to Marcus, Johannes, Derick and Ilia for supporting this event.

Can anyone remember the nice girls from Brazil back in 2003? Well, we replaced the girls with the PHP Lounge where we set up an environment with a bunch of sockets, free beer, nice music and some of the PHP pros acting as coaches where you could discuss the PHP problems you might have been experiencing in your company and talking about your current projects. I joined the PHP lounge together with some CIO of a department of S**mens (he’s been attending the Conference for years and I really enjoy talking with him about his latest projects), drinking some beer and talking with some guys from Intergenia about bug and request tracking, CVSSpam and Scrum.

Finally, my company was a silver sponsor at this Conference, having our own booth (where you could win two iPod shuffles – congrats to Dirk and Arne!) and providing free PHP5 posters, PHP stickers and ThinkPHP lenyards for special persons (kudos Zeev). :-) We did not
only provide those dogfood for community, but also presented our commercial services. Of course, this year we also provided exhibition booths for OpenSource projects like Hardened PHP, Horde and others.

This year we were giving some sessions (/me with „100,000 SQLite installations – lessons learned“, „WebServices with PHP5“ andAlex Aulbach about MySQL Cluster). We’ll post the slides soon on this blog, so stay tuned.

More and more companies are discovering LAMP as an enterprise-grade, OpenSource stack to built mission-critical applications on it.
Web development companies are developing LAMP applications for businesses like Disney, Deutsche Telekom, Sueddeutsche.de, Lufthansa and such.
But what about a professional support with guaranteed response times up to 2 hours? That’s where our PHP/LAMP support is targeted at, including support for databases like MySQL for example.

We provide support for enterprise companies that have their own development department, but need someone who is helping them
if they experience problems while developing their application, including application management and monitoring. The support
program is for an unlimited number of servers in your company.

If you are an ISV or SI with your own PHP developers, then this support is also for you: we can assist you through the support
and provide reliable knowledge and responsibility for PHP. The support program is divided into Basic, Professional and Gold. 24/7on request.

PHP has been used in the business for years. In fact, we and many other companies provided business-critical solutions based on PHP (or LAMP) for several years now. Magazines
like PHP Magazin or web sites likePHP-Center.de or Dynamic-Webpages.de, not forgetting the world’s first PHP Conference that took place here in Germany provided the fruitful ground for a market that continously attracted larger businesses searching for
a fast, reliable and easy-to-deploy solution for their critical business processes.

General IT magazines like iX or c’t had several articles about PHP in the past,
even the Computerwoche had several
news items/articles about PHP and MySQL.

The overall success of the usage of PHP and the popular LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) wouldn’t be possible with the help of thousands of people who have fun
contributing code, insights, documentation pieces, tutorials, FAQs, sessions on Conferences and sharing their time to learn from each other. Thanks to all,
and I’m glad to see some of you on next week’s International PHP Conference.

Frankly, PCP reminds me on an idea I had 6 to 12 months ago and briefly discussed it with Zak Greant (who discussed it with one of the inventors of the JCP, the Java Community Process with its JSR’s), IIRC Stig Bakken and others. We called it „PHP Community Process“. My basic concern was that while we have PEAR and PECL, there is no „controlled“ way of implementing PHP packages/specifications that may emerge to some kind of an industry standard. PEAR was a good beginning but with the recent acknowledge from industry vendors I think we need some kind of „JCP“ (have a look at „PHP-170“ where we ported the JSR-170 standard for content management to PHP which recently stepped into the Apache Incubator process on the project Jackrabbit) for PHP. PEAR contains working packages for direct use, the JCP with its JSRs contains also only specifications with APIs while the implementation can be done by anyone – with the new OOP functionality in PHP5 like abstract classes, interfaces etc. this is no problem as our port of JSR-170 proves.

In contrast, the „PHP Collaboration Project“ seems to be a good beginning, but I think at the end we need some kind of a process where both the community and so called „expert groups“ consisting of subject matter experts (i.e. from companies) are working out a specification along with an API and a reference implementation. At the end of the day, this will hopefully lead into stable APIs for packages/reference implementations.

I don’t say that the PHP world should simply copy the JCP 1-to-1, but I think it would be good to think about specifications and APIs instead of „frameworks“ (there’s always more than 1 solution in the PHP world) as the „PHP Collaboration Project“ does.

Infos

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